The Gun In Your Hands
by empousai
Summary: Something is wrong. You look at the gun in your hands and for a moment, you don't quite know what to do with it.


**the gun in your hands**

You look at the gun in your hands and for a moment, you don't quite know what to do with it. It all happened so quickly. You look up and there's a man in front of you. He looks scared. His eyes flicker to something by your feet and you notice there's a guy lying there. He's unconscious, sprawled awkwardly, one arm at a funny angle. Your head feels full and tight, like your surroundings are pushing at you. You don't quite know what's going on.

There's a gun in your hand. You don't quite know what's going on with that, either.

Because, you see, you know, deep down inside, that you don't do guns. It started out as hatred. Silly, of course. You didn't just wake up one day and decided to hate guns. You had a reason. In the beginning, there was you and blood and your eyes were blurry from the heat around you. There was blood on your hands and on your face and you could have lived with it if it had only been yours. Yeah, it started out as hatred. But you look at that gun in your hand now and you don't quite remember what happened. Something must have happened that made you hate guns - something to do with blood on your hands and on your face. Shouldn't you remember something like that?

"Eliot."

It has become an automatic action. Press down on the little button with your thumb, hold out your hand, let the magazine fall into it and throw it away. And you know that sometimes you catch yourself looking if the magazine is full, as if it mattered. Sometimes, the more automatic action would be to push the magazine back in and shoot. Like right now. Right now, you're standing there with a guy at your feet and another guy looking at you and you have no idea if you were about to push the magazine in or throw it away. You peer at your left hand. The magazine is full. But why would you throw away a full magazine? There's blood on your arm. You can see that now. Your head hurts even worse, all of a sudden. Like it wants to tell you something. Remember?

"Eliot!"

You think that you would probably still hit anything in your way, even with your head tight and blood on you, because they trained you well. You used to look through the scope of a sniper rifle, used to sweat into your ghillie suit, waiting for the perfect moment. That guy seems to be waiting, too. He's standing there, eyes flickering to your right. Someone is coming towards you. You're in a fight you must be, if you've got a gun. Your hand trembles, maybe because it knows that in a fight, when someone comes at you, you shoot them. But remember? You don't do guns. Because something happened. A long time ago, remember?

"Eliot, look at me."

The person that was coming at you is stopping. It's a woman. She's wearing a suit with a skirt instead of pants. High heels. Open hair.

"Eliot, put the gun down. We've got him."

You want to flinch when she talks to you, but her voice is so sweet. You think it would be an insult to her to flinch away from her. You look back down, at the gun in your hands and for a moment, you don't quite know what to do. Then her hand reaches out and she carefully takes the empty gun from you and all the while she keeps talking, telling you it's okay, that everything's over. There is someone with her, a man with curly hair. He's snapping orders at someone invisible.

There are sirens coming closer and the woman steers you off somewhere. You're moving fast, away from the policija. The man is coming with you, a hand on the woman's back. You stop around a corner, and someone moves you against the wall, holding you up. People are talking around you. "Something's wrong," the woman says, and you know she's talking about you because the man with the curly hair turns his face away like he can't bear to look at you. "He hit his head pretty hard," a black guy says and you wonder if that's where the blood came from.

"I'm okay," you say, mostly to reassure the woman. You have no idea who she is, or why she is here, in a war zone, with high heels on. Something stings in your arm. You try to follow the conversation they have around you, about you, with you but it gets slower and more quiet, as if someone turned the volume down. The tightness in your head leaves and everything goes numb. You want to ask what's going on, if you're in the safe zone already. Your lips won't move. The full magazine in your left hand clatters to the floor.

And then it's over.


End file.
